La facultad

“Pain makes us acutely anxious to avoid more of it, so we hone that radar. It is a kind of survival tactic, that people caught between the worlds, unknowingly cultivate.”

In the chapter ‘Entering into the Serpent’, Gloria Anzaldua introduces the concept of la facultad, which she defines as the ability to capture the depth of the world and the soul by breaking the habitual modes of seeing reality and perceiving consciousness. La facultad is ‘excruciating’; because it is enabled through fear, because only those who live in the borderland experience it, because it does not reside in reason but in the body, and because it is born not out of choice but out of compulsion; to protect, to survive. In other words, la facultad is to know that you are living in a borderland, to experience oppression as a part of existing, to feel fear and pain as an ever-present emotion, to be alert of a continuously lingering danger, and then, to live in a way that is reactionary. Reactionary because it is a reaction to birth in the borderland.  It is to be shaped by, and refracted through the white male lens. It is to live in ‘half and half’, and never as a whole. It is to suffer from ‘absolute despot duality’ such that you are reduced to either this or that. It is to be looted and silenced. It is to survive from within the power webs that aim to kill.

Anzaldua’s la facultad resonates with Frantz Fanon’s notion of the world ‘divided into two’, and native percipience. In ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, Fanon talks about how “the native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier.” The people on the border live a life of duality, denial, and dichotomy. They experience pain because they are unable to find themselves a ‘home’ where they belong. They experience fear because they are constantly being treated like a nobody. They are pushed to a ‘zone of non-being’, such that they are invisible, and assured to remain so by looting their language, and silencing their histories. However, for Fanon, pain and fear makes the ‘colonized man an envious man’ such that he desires to replace the colonizer and become the persecutor. He is dehumanized, and desensitized. On the contrary, for Anzaldua, pain and fear can open new possibilities if it is experienced by those that live on the borderlands but are not caught in the mode of acceptance and victimization. In other words, la facultad can be an opportunity.

La facultad is destructive and creative at one time. It is created when ‘one’s defenses and resistance’ are destroyed. In other words, it is here then, that pain becomes a survival tactic. Pain and fear destroys, but at the same time, it forces to know and see differently. If to know is to conquer, then for Anzaldua, to know is to achieve la facultad, and to conquer is to survive. To be able to achieve la facultad is to reject singularity; of past, present and future alike. Instead, it is to open up the creation of new possibilities, interception of multiple ways of being, and acceptance of plural futures.

This is the journey that Anzaldua undertakes for the creation of a new Mestiza consciousness. Rebirth, for Anzaldua then, is the realization of a human existence which transcends class, race, gender and sexuality, and wherein all people are of the same level as others.